Author
Topic: WYSIWYG Editor (Read 4816 times)

Apparently its default now? My forum settings has the "Show WYSIWYG editor on post page by default" option unchecked.I'm sorry, but I'm not a fan. :\The two forums I use frequently that already had a rich text editor have all kinds of problems with it. I'd much rather use BBCode.

Note: This post contains content that is meant to be whimsical. Any belittlement or trivialization of complex issues is only intended to lighten the mood and does not reflect upon the merit of those positions.

Its fine as an option, but I really dislike them on forums for some reason. Like, intensely seethe at. So yes, I want to turn it off.

Minecraft forum's WYSIWIG is buggy as all getout (and they use a third party tool and fixes are slow in coming).

Copingand pasting text inserts random line breaks for no apparent reason, for instance. It has trouble with embedded youtube videos, the forums support--but can't correctly display--spoiler tags. The first problem is that the WYSIWYG editor can'tcollapse them, the second problem is that nested spoiler tags (while they do nest!) aren't rendered in a way that you can tell where a nested spoiler begins and ends once its opened.

Multiple quotes in the same post frequently break (closing [/quote] tags are incorrectly stripped). Nested lists break (see next issue). Random, unnecessary paragraph tags are inserted (and every edit/save action inserts new ones). Switching to BBcode mode makes the editor lag like CRAZY. No really, it would read the keyboard input buffer slower and slower the longer the post was. This post would have already been under 1 keystroke / second. Trying to break a quote into multiple quote boxes works sometimes (right now there's an issue where you have to insert 2 paragraph breaks for it to understand what you want it to do, which leaves a line break at the top of the second, and backspacing it off deletes the whole next paragraph.

The other forum that uses a WYSIWYG that I have to suffer through decided to build their own forum from the ground up, for no reason, including their own WYSIWYG editor, which has limited functionality, and some features are just broken (there's @user support, for instance, but typing an [email protected] address makes it email@domain.com user-mention instead, and even then sometimes it goes and shows @userid-12345 instead of the user name...or outright doesn't even notify the user). Though, my biggest problem with that forum is that pagination is AJAXed. They had to add url-redirect support so you could actually use the browser history meaningfully when navigating multiple pages of a thread. But this also means that following a notification or other URL that causes the correct page of a thread to load means you can't just alt-left (or in my case, mouse-thumb-button-2) to go back a page, because there's now an extra redirect in the browser history. There was also a brief period where you couldn't stay logged in, a different period where you would...as long as you didn't ctrl-click or middle-click a link to open a forum page in a new tab (same tab stayed logged in, new tab logged you out). "Report post/thread to moderator" is a feature that was promised as "coming soon" about 9 months ago. As I have a bookmark to their internal bug tracker (due to the sheer number of bugs I was reporting, I was given knowledge of the internal issue tracker) I once saw a report that "unmarking a user as a troll makes them a global moderator" (like...how do you screw that up that badly?) Then there's the problem that the forums have a dark background and the editor is white (like here!) and so correctly chosing colors is difficult. Of course...over there links have a style that causes them to be white when you mouse-over them. Which includes when you're editing in the editor. :| (Edit: we don't have a smiley selector? Do we not have a :| face?)

Oh, and the AJAX thing? Yeah, it stores results as cookie data / local storage. The entire HTML content of the page load. And it keeps it forever. I once broke the forums because I had 8+ friggin megs of stored pages which were all out of date (and the browser wouldn't allow more to be saved, so the pages would simply fail to load at all). Additionally, I found that user personal information was included in that data (i.e. email addresses of users, which were not publicly visible on their profiles). Fortunately that was fixed right quick.

So yeah.Rich text editors have their place, but I really, truly, dislike them for forum posting. I don't begrudge those that do like them, but I want the option to turn it off and leave it off.

My biggest problem with WYSIWYG editors is when you try to edit things and all hell breaks loose and you get font size changes, color changes and headlines exploding all over the place. For just general posting it's usually fine.

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Hem. Maybe a deep uninstalling is a bit too much. There are people out there that liked it (I think). There were an option in the profile settings to disable it but it didn't work. Maybe fixing the disable button would have fixed the problem.

Well, now it's uninstalled, I guess it would be pointless to reinstall it.